I’ve already used this book as a counter-example in my note on The MANIAC, so it’s only fair to give it its own entry. The first part is genuinely good. Mallaby is very strong on Demis Hassabis’s early years, the gaming background, the chess, and later the Go and the board games. Hassabis is a genuinely interesting person and obviously extremely intelligent, and the account of how he assembled his interests into a research programme is worth reading. ...
Tracy Kidder spent 1978 and 1979 with a team at Data General in Westborough, Massachusetts, watching them build a 32-bit minicomputer in a basement. The machine was code-named Eagle, and it existed because Digital had shipped the VAX and Data General had nothing to answer it with. The book came out in 1981 and won the Pulitzer. That’s the setup, but it doesn’t really explain why the book is as good as it is. ...
I came to this book backwards. Years before reading it I listened to every episode of the podcast it came out of, and that was during COVID, when we were still living in Toronto. I’d go out for night walks in the middle of a frigid Canadian winter with John Green in my ears. His voice is sorrowful and calming at the same time, which turned out to be roughly what I needed that year. ...
This is the second book in The Captive’s War, following The Mercy of Gods. It is James S.A. Corey. I loved every single Expanse book, and I love this series too, so I am not exactly a neutral party here. What they do well, they keep doing. The alien civilisations are actually alien, which sounds like a low bar until you notice how rarely anyone clears it. Most science fiction gives you humans with a different number of limbs. This gives you something whose reasoning you have to work at. Alongside that there is a full imagining of how a society and an economy would actually hold together under these conditions, and none of it comes at the cost of the pace. It is a thrill ride the whole way through. ...
I expected more from this one, and I want to be careful about how I say that, because the writing is excellent throughout. I love Tóibín. The Magician is one of my favourite books. Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, and her inner life is imagined and rendered about as well as I have seen it done. The story just flows. ...